Reinhard Burger, president of the Institute, said the pattern of the 2011 E. coli outbreak had produced enough evidence to draw the conclusion that German vegetable sprouts caused the outbreak (that has killed 50 and sickened nearly 3,100) even though no tests on sprouts from an organic farm in Lower Saxony, Germany had come back positive for the E. coli strain behind the outbreak.[5]

^Evans, Richard J. (2009). The Third Reich at War: 1939-1945 (reprint ed.). Penguin. ISBN978-1101022306. [start page PT531 quote] After being approved on 29 December 1941 at a meeting of representatives of various interested parties, including the Army Sanitary Inspectorate, the Military SS, the Reich Health Leader and the Robert Koch Institute (the leading centre for bacteriological research), experiments were set in motion at the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the initial experiment, 145 innmates were first given a course of injections of the vaccine, or (if they belonged to a control group) not, and were then, a fortnight or so after the final dose, injected again, this time with the blood of a patient infected with the most virulent form of typhus. The experiment was repeated a further eight times with different vaccines. For 127 out of the 537 camp inmates subjected to these procedures the results were fatal.[end quote]